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Sonic Bubbles — Twenty Thousand Hertz
- Format: Single episode
- Year: 2021
- Listen on: Apple Podcasts or Spotify
One of the most recent episodes of Twenty Thousand Hertz investigates the devices that shape the auditory landscape, taking the listener on a journey to the origins of noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines and nature recordings.
You become accustomed to the hustle and bustle of the city, the car hooters and electricity buzzing, the hiss of the coffee machine and the calls of phones ringing. Often, one only notices when you step out into the quiet how noisy your world has become.
From melodies of the natural world to man-made jingles, sound is all around us and it affects our environments in ways we often don’t realise.
As they say, knowledge is power, and once humans figured out we could control our environments by controlling sound we tapped into that.
“If I’m feeling distracted and I need to focus, I might put on some lo-fi hip-hop. If I’m frazzled after a long day, I’ll put on some jazz. But it goes beyond just music. I also use a white noise machine to help me fall asleep at night. And when I’m travelling, and the noise around me is just too much, I’ll put on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones,” says host Dallas Taylor.
“Technologies like these help us create our own personal sonic bubble.”
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Sonic bubbles, guest Mack Hagood explains, offer us self-control through sound control. “They help us control our own attention, and the way we feel, by controlling what we hear,” he says.
Hagood’s book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, explores how humans use technology to control their sonic environments through what he has dubbed “Orphic media” or “technologies that generate a safe space through sound”.
Taylor takes the listener back to the 1920s, telling the story of science fiction writer Hugo Gernsback.
“Gernsback kept getting distracted while he was trying to work, so he invented a device that he called The Isolator. It was this huge rounded helmet that completely covered your head. It had black eyes, and honestly looked like something out of a horror movie.
“It looked like an old-fashioned diving helmet. It had a little slit for eyes so that you could only see the line of text that you were trying to write, and it blocked out external sound. In fact, it covered your head so completely that you needed to use an oxygen tank in order to wear this thing,” Hagood explains.
(As you listen to the sounds of muffled breathing and the hiss of oxygen, is there anything more science fiction than The Isolator?)
Understandably, this invention never quite caught on. But the sounds that Gernsback was trying to escape were not going anywhere, so similar inventions, all trying to find a way to block out noise, soon followed.
The world was opening up, and with the factories, highways and cities that were rising from the industrial revolution came the bangs of car exhausts, the clang of metal and the grinding of gears.
“And all of that machinery made noise,” Taylor says. “Noise, which was sort of this industrial by-product, was something you didn’t want, right? As the years went by, these noises kept piling up,” Hagood explains.
“We get these innovations like the jet airplane, the interstate highway system, the open-plan office, all of these things amplify and proliferate noise. But there weren’t just new sounds to avoid. There were also new sounds to enjoy,” Taylor adds.
“We got used to mediated sound like listening to records or talking on the telephone, or listening to the radio. As a result, people's relationship to sound changes and we become these kinds of sonic consumers,” Hagood says.
Now people are not just trying to drown out noise, especially since it seems almost impossible to escape it completely, but rather to modify, manipulate and get creative with the sounds we are exposed to. Cue white noise.